The inspiration for this post came from my being too lazy to set my iPod to shuffle, and then noticing it played a bunch of songs in a row from the 1930s and '40s that started with the letters "in" ("In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," "In the Still of the Night", etc.) Naturally, being a data nerd, my first thought was to quantify the phenomenon.

The data comes not from Billboard itself, but from www.bullfrogspond.com; I don't know much about the data source, but it certainly looks thorough and painstaking, and up to date. If you'd like to know a little more about my methodology (like a quick explanation of the metric, "keyness"), see the code I used and/or see the actual songs that correspond to these words, head on over to my other, nerdier blog, prooffreaderplus.

Observations about the results:

The 2010s seem both more vulgar ("hell" and "fuck") and more inclusive ("we" instead of the "you", "ya" and "u" of the 1990s and 2000s).

The 1990s and 2000s were the decades of neologisms, with "U", "Ya" and "Thang". "U" was so popular it occurred twice (but see the note on decade-binning on prooffreaderplus.)

Fun! Lots of the decades can be made into intelligible five-word sentences. For example: "Hell Yeah, We Die, Fuck!" (2010s). "Ya Breathe It Like U" (2000s), "You Get Up, U Thang" (1990s), "Don't Rock On Fire, Love" (1980s), "Sing, Moon, In A Swing" (1930s)

As anyone who listens to the radio in December knows, all the Christmas songs are oldies, and that shows in the results for the 1950s, with "Christmas" and "Red-nosed".

You can track genres with the keywords: "Rag" (1910s), "Blues" (1920s), "Swing" (1930s), "Boogie", "Polka" (1940s), "Mambo" (1950s), "Twist" (1960s), "Disco" (1970s), "Rock" (1970s and 1980s). After that, people realized you don't have to actually name the genre in the song title, people can figure it out by listening. (N'Sync must not have gotten that memo for 2001's "Pop".)

Who knew Billboard song rankings went back to the 1890s? It was a surprise to me. That fact, and the fact that there are fewer songs then, but not so few as to be negligible, influenced a lot of the choices into how I presented this data (read more here if you want). But those early decades seem to be more focused on first names ("Michael", "Reuben", "Casey"), familial relationships ("Uncle", "Mammy")

The first two decades -- the oldest ones compared to now -- both have the keyword "old". I blame time travel.

I find it interesting that there are short, common articles, adverbs, prepositions and pronouncs in the list; these have a higher bar for keyness, since they're present in other decades: "When" (1900s), "A" (1930s), "In" (1930s), "On" (1980s), "Up" (1990s), "It" (2000s)

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hunt through my iPod to see if there's even one song with "gems" in the title; it seems to have been popular in the 1910s.

Below is a climate model projection of what areas of North America will be snow-covered on December 25 of each year between 2014 and 2100:

A few things should be pointed out. First and foremost is:

Further to point #1 above, the point of this kind of climate model is not to accurately predict the weather every single day for 87 years, even though that's what the model contains. The point is to experiment, and experimental science is built on prediction. Evaluating those predictions makes for better models down the road. I'm no climatologist, so I'll let the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute explain Why We Use Climate Models.

In the map above, white is 100% snow coverage, and the white becomes more and more transparent at the fringes from 99% to 1% snow coverage, until the bare background is 0% snow coverage. The resolution of the climate model is only 0.44 degrees, so the fit isn't exact at the coastlines.

That global warming kinda sneaks up on you, doesn't it? It's gradual, but when it loops back down to 2014, it's pretty obvious. I imagine people in Grande Prairie, Alberta are looking forward to the end of the 21st century.

Here is a post on my other, nerdier blog about how to make maps in Python based on the CCCma's NetCDF files. There are plenty of examples out there on plotting these files, but not with the format CCCma uses.

The copyright to Gadsby expired because Wright's estate didn't apply for a renewal, so you can find the entire lipogram (that's the term for this kind of writing) here or here. I tried to read it , but it was just too difficult. Not entirely due to the missing letter, but because it's really, really uninteresting. You want a good lipogram, try A Void (which I couldn't find an electronic version of to analyze), a lipogrammatic translation of a French lipogramatic novel. How impressive is that?

As data-centric soft of fellow, my immediate thought was to wonder how this constraint affected the word and letter frequency compared to 'normal' English. Obviously (I posited, correctly), word choice would be affected much more profoundly. On reading it, I saw there were a lot of Anglo-Saxon words and irregular verbs ("said", "had", "was", etc.). So, using Python's Natural Language Toolkit, I calculated word frequencies and compared them to the Brown corpus -- after I'd removed every word containing the letter 'e' from the latter. I used the standard technique of Log Likelihood keyness (basically, it's the confidence that a difference in frequency is 'real' instead of random) to determine the significance of word frequency differences (I've put the frequencies and comparisons using different metrics of all 3934 unique words in Gadsby in a Google Doc if you're interested):

The overrepresented words contain character names, but also "big" (as a replacement for "large"? "enormous"?) and "folks" ("people"?). The underrepresented words are the ones I found interesting, however: "of", "to" and "in" are very common words in English, and to have their usage reduced that much implies that even though they do not contain the letter "e", they are used in tandem with words containing "e" -- such as "the". So I analyzed how often each word has a neighboring "e"-word in Brown, and made a quasi-volcano plot (the area of the circles is the frequency in Gadsby):

You can see there's a palpable tendency for the over- and underrepresented words to be adjacent to "e"-containing words, whereas in that mishmash in the middle (words that have comparable frequencies in Gadsby and Brown), the probability of e-adjacency is far more spread out.

How much of this is simply due to the word "the"? Here's a volcano-ish plot restricting the analysis to frequency of "the"-adjacence in the full Brown:

We basically see the same pattern, but lower down the graph because we're using a more restrictive metric. The spike in the top middle shows that words that are often "the"-adjacent in Brown are, unsurprisingly, rare in Gadsby.

Letter frequencies

Well, that was fun. Next item: what happens to letter frequencies (again, here's a Google Doc)? Let's compare Gadsby to Brown-without-e-words:

That was unexpected (by me, anyway). The only vowel to be more frequent in Gadsby is the relatively little-used "u"! The others, "a", "e", and "i", are all less used in Gadsby. It appears that the slack must be taken up by moderate-frequency consonants. Let's have a look at the log-likelihoods:

I would never have predicted "g" and "f" to be the biggest winner and loser, respectively! Here are the top 10 g-containing words:

Of course, there's the main character, Mr. Gadsby himself (interesting aside: Wright never calls him that, because even though "Mr" contains no "e", it's short for a word that does, and that would be cheating). Now let's see the "f"-containing words in the Brown corpus:

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

This is from an analysis of Brigham Young University's Corpus of Historical American English, sort of a way-better-curated and easier-to-search version of Google Ngram Viewer. It covers a selected corpus of English from different genres and sources from 1810 to 2009.

Of course, the analysis is biased towards words at the beginning or end of the date range. We haven't stopped using the top word, 'soviet' (and we probably never will); as the decades pass, its frequency per decade metric will decline and decline, barring an unexpected return of the USSR. 'Soviet' also gets a boost because it's both a common and a proper noun, and I only used words that appeared in the Moby Scrabble list, which excludes proper nouns. I decided not to leave this word be, since it's totally different in usage from the top proper nouns that were excluded.

Almost all of these words are modern one, showing that the English vocabulary has been more in flux in modern times (the results are normalized per decade, so the terms do indeed take up a higher percentage of all words in the corpus from that decade). There are only five words that were not used in the first decade of the 21st century, and some of them are common-and-proper like 'soviet'. They are also the only words used in only six or fewer decades.

Words that were used in 16 decades or more were omitted; they were mostly uninteresting words like articles, prepositions, etc. that would have been removed by a common stoplist anyway.

What's intriguing is that references to World War I began increasing even before World War II began in Europe. The big growth obviously came as the war began and after its conclusion, but this suggests that in at least some texts, "World War II" was used in the same ominous, premonitory way that "World War III" is today.

There are problems with the methodology and conclusions by both parties, as almost always happens when people use Google Ngram Viewer without understanding how it works and what its limitations are (which Culturomics -- yes, that's really the name of the organization in charge of Google Ngram Viewer -- does not at all go out of its way to acknowledge).

First of all, the title (and the tweet) mentions 'World War I', and the search is for 'first world war'; these aren't the same phrase, and that's what first set my alarm bell ringing. Also, the default setting in Google Ngrams Viewer is for a smoothing of 3, which means, for example, results for 1936 are a combination of the results from 1933 to 1939. So seeing the graph start to rise in 1936 is pretty much indicative of nothing. Also, you say the '(All') next to each search term? That means the search is agglomerating every combination of upper- and lowercase results.

Let's have a look at unsmoothed, case-sensitive searches for the most common ways to refer to both wars ('WWI' and 'WWII' are much less common than these, BTW):

Firstly, the 'exact moment' that Keller referred to is a little more complicated when the results are case-sensitive; you can see the big hump at the beginning of what he implies is 'First World War' is actually 'first World War' -- a description, not a name, if 'first' isn't capitalized.

Secondly, virtually all of these terms start being used in 1939 or later; pretty much the opposite of Matthews's conclusion. There's a little bit of 1930-1938 activity, but it pales in comparison to the mentions these terms get in 1893.

Wait, what?

This is something people who use Google Ngram Viewer regularly are very familiar with. It's based on automatic processing of Google Books, which is based on automatic processing of library books. Lots of the dates of books are just plain wrong, lots of books are given the date of their first edition even though the scan is of a later edition with an introduction written with vocabulary from decades after the fact, and there are lots of OCR errors (that last one doesn't seem to be relevant in this case).

What are these 1893 books use these terms? Luckily, Google Ngram Viewer links directly to Google Books search, so we can find out easily -- as, really, should anyone who uses this tool, as a basic 'sanity check' on their conclusions (click to enlarge):

Obviously, none of the sentences with the search terms were written in 1893. That small level of activity pre-1939 does not pass this threshold of activity to be sure they were written contemporaneously to the listed date. (The original graphs started at 1900, BTW, so this bit of counterfactual information was not visible.)

Just for fun, let's check Matthews's statement about how 'World War III' is used today (along with 'Third World War':

It appears that the big rise in these terms was during World War II -- which kind of makes sense, we've just started calling them I and II, III is an obvious point of speculation. The high point was in the 1950s, but then it's calmed down a lot to 'today' (the graph stops at 2000 because data from 2000 to 2008, where the database stops, are profoundly changed by the advent of digital media and can't easily be compared to the corpus before this data).

While "trend" has a clear mathematical definition, "trendiness" does not; I've chosen a method that is equally sensitive to the nerdy sense of the word (rapidity of rise/fall) AND the common meaning ("trendy" = "popular"). More explanation later; here's the chart (click to enlarge):

The calculations were done on the Corpus of Historical American English from Brigham Young University. You can see from their content list that they are heavy on books in the 19th century, then gradually newspapers take up more and more of the corpus. The overall amount of fiction is relatively stable, but this trend analysis is quite sensitive to corpus composition in each decade.

Until the 1920s, every popular word comes from books, usually a character name. For example, in the 1870s, there were at least five major books by different authors with a major character (whose name, therefore, got repeated a lot) named Elsie. It appears (at first glance, anyway) that character names had a bandwagon effect, much like baby names do 100 years later.

Also present are deliberately misspelled words like "uv" for "of" and "ter" for "to" (like "Ah oughts ter uv dun somethin") . This was a style of satirical writing at the time, not all of it racist, but certainly some of it.

In the 20th century, President's names dominate, except for "planes" during World War II and, surprisingly to me, EPA (for Environmental Protection Agency) in the 1990s. The reason it beat out "Clinton" is that his name kept being used throughout the next decade, and "Bush" because that name has a common meaning as well.

A few observations: most of the words have a peak width of 10 years (the minimum, since COHA's resolution is at the decade level). Notable exceptions are Roosevelt (FDR was president during two decades, one wartime) and Soviet (a 40 year peak, which means the peak height was quite high to make it on the list). Some words of note: failed presidential candidates Dewey, Stevenson and Goldwater; Newt (but not Gingrich); Hitler and Nazi; Watergate; Ronald (the only presidential first name on the list).

The COHA 1-gram corpus is restricted, but I have an academic licence. Thanks to BYU for that. On my GitHub, I have summary data, but not the dataset itself.

COHA is arranged in decades; I assigned each word the year in the middle of the decade (e.g. 1970s, which covers 1970-1979, was assigned 1975).

For each word, I interpolated by simple mean the popularity for years ending in "0". For example, if a word was a 0.0024% in 1975 and 0.0026% in 1985, I assigned 0.0025% in 1980. This was so peak widths for words that appeared only in one decade could be calculated (otherwise they would have a peak width of zero, and have infinite 'trendiness').

Instead of interpolating further to calculate peak widths (which would be entering overfitting territory), I used a simple Boolean test to calculate the start and end of each peak. The first time a point at a five-year interval exceeded 50% maximum peak height, the counter started, and then the first time it sank below 50%, it stopped. This means if a word was bimodal (two peaks in different years) with a point below 50% of maximum between the two peaks, only the larger peak was counted. This was not a common occurrence, and it ensured words only ever appeared once each.

"Trendiness" was calculated by the peak height (in % of corpus during that year) divided by peak width (in years, always a multiple of five for reasons explained in the previous step)

Sunday, September 14, 2014

As you can see, mythological boys' names were pretty negligible until the mid-1990s, after which they've had quite an explosion, with boys named Phoenix, Odin and Ares leading the pack. Girls having mythological names was more common than boys in the past, but they've increased as well, and the composition of the names has changed dramatically. In 1940, Minerva and Vesta were the most popular (a virgin Greek warrior goddess and a virgin Roman goddess of the hearth ... I'll let you draw your own conclusions from this). Now it's Athena and Isis, unfortunately for those who watch the news from Iraq these days. (Note: an earlier version of the girls' graph omitted the name Athena; thanks to reader John for noticing it.)

Categorizing baby names is not straightforward; there's a judgment call involved. You can cast a broad net, and accept those called Amon, which is coincidentally both an Egyptian God's name and a Hebrew name, which pretty much makes the list meaningless because it's dominated by such names. Or you try to judge through semi-quantitative methods whether a name would, by a reasonable person in American society, be thought of as mythological.

So I limited the mythologies to Greek, Norse, Egyptian and Roman, because they're the most well-known mythologies in this culture. I had to pass on Celtic, because so many of their names are both mythological and common (like Brigid or Dylan). I used nameberry.com's database of name origin's to see whether names were mythological in origin or shared the name with other, more popular, traditions.

The graphs start at 1940 because even though the Social Security Administration publishes them back to 1880, the data is extremely unrepresentative in the early years.

Were people named after Pokémon? Obviously, the reverse happens, since there's a Pokémon named Casey. These graphs are more jagged because the y axis is less than 10% that of the mythological names charts, and some names are rising above and dipping below the dataset's minimum of five babies in a given year.

It appears that only the boys' name Yadon appeared post-Pokémon; rather surprisingly, Lizardo appears once in 1970 before reappearing once in 2010. This dataset is riddled with errors, however, especially before digitial data entry, so it's quite possibly apocryphal.

Girls named Eevee, Amaura, Kimon and Kameil only appeared post-Pokémon; Abra has been around since the mid-'50s and enjoyed a brief surge around the time the Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra" was playing on the radio. I remember those days; the lyric "I wanna reach out and grab ya" was pretty racy for Top 40 back then.

Conditional probabilities can give you a headache; that's why the Monty Hall problem is so difficult. The best way to grasp it is by example. Look at the darkest point, for QU. This shows that, GIVEN Q, the next letter is U 98.7% of the time. Similarly, the dark spot on the bottom left shows that GIVEN Y, the most probable event is that there is NO letter following it (signified by "_"), i.e. it's at the end of a word.

The second graph below shows the reverse probabilities, e.g. given U, what's the probability that a Q precedes it, and given we're at the end of a word, what's the probability that the last letter is Y. Trust me, I know, it requires a little mental agility, I've been working on this for a week and I still get mixed up. If you can understand why, in the top graph, the horizontal rows add up to 100% but the vertical columns don't, you've totally got it.

The source data is the COHA corpus of Historical American English; each word was analyzed and weighted as to their frequency (so the "th" in "the" influenced the probability of H following T way more than the "th" in theremin.)

Here's a GitGub repo with the code used to produce the data; after experimentation, both Plotly and Bokeh had serious drawbacks when it came to presenting heatmaps of this sort (which will presumably be addressed by later releases), so I went with Tableau Public, took about 20 minutes tops. Note that with this app, you can click things and hide things and have all kinds of fun.

Here's the graph of the probabilities of letters preceding, not following, one another. There are also static graphic versions at the very end. Enjoy!

This data set is a rich vein for data mining. Plus it's almost completely uncurated, so it's a good target for data spelunking (that's my own idiolect for testing the boundaries of a dataset, to see what false conclusions it can appear to support). However, it's slow going because the metadata alone is really, really enormous (I've only got a fraction of it, and it's more than 3 terabytes). But as I peruse, I've come across some items of interest, totally non-systematically:

1. Butt Naked appears to be taking the place of Buck Naked
The etymology of the phrase "buck naked" is shrouded in mystery; some even think it's a Bowdlerization, and "butt naked" was the original term. But it's clear that in this corpus, anyway, "butt naked" is becoming more and more popular. I hypothesize that it's an example of elision (the k sound followed by the n sound is difficult to say, whereas the t becomes a glottal stop and rolls right off the... er, glottis.) Plus it does make a certain semantic sense: if you're naked, one can see your butt, no?
Speaking of naked (my searches for this word seem to have influenced my Google AdWords profile, so I'm getting much racier suggestions online), this was a little surprising to me:

Does this mean we're getting more prurient, and less willing to discuss the absence of clothes? Probably not. The Google Books corpus is heavily weighted with 'Library Bias'; it reflects the contents of books it was able to scan in the mid-2000s. I believe a higher proportion of 19th-century books in the corpus are biblical or scientific compared to later books, and use the word less ashamedly.

2. OCR sometimes misreads 'arms' as 'anus'

I didn't come up with this observation of the fallible nature of Optical Character Recognition, but I haven't seen any Ngrams of it. This story got wide media coverage in May 2014, when someone noticed some old romance novels in Google Books contained phrases like this (click to enlarge):

Most of these Google Books examples are difficult to find individually in Google Ngrams viewer (but they're there, you just have to dig), because the exact search phrase has to appear more than 40 times in a year to be listed in their metadata. I first became aware of this risible phenomenon in 2009 thanks to this blog post, but it didn't get much traction at the time. So it goes.

3. 19th century iPhone?

I'm reasonably certain U.S. President Martin Van Buren didn't have an iPhone in the 1830s. Anachronisms in this data set sometimes come from documents being assigned the wrong pulibcation year, but that bias usually works in the opposite direction: A book writien in 1848 is reprinted in 1964, so it shows up in the database as a later year. In general, it's been my experience that modern terms in the past come from OCR errors (sometimes, as in this case, errors in word boundaries; there's a species of snake and a character in the Aeneid called Tisiphone that sometimes is rendered "tis iphone"... and then there are errors that are much less understandable, such as the following:

The OCR thinks "There" is "iPhone", with proper trademark capitalization? I posit there's a non-random error responsible for that.

I'll leave you with a few other 19th-century anachronisms (click to enlarge):